Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 21.djvu/672

656 once in three years came the navy of Tarshish, bringing gold and silver, and ivory, and apes, and peacocks." This is repeated in 2 Chronicles ix, 21. The joint expeditions to Ophir referred to in 1 Kings ix, 27, 28, x and xi, and in 2 Chronicles ix, 10, were probably of the same kind. The name of Tarshish (Tartessus in Spain), the most important trading-point of the Phœnicians, had probably come into application to designate all large merchant-vessels designed for long sea-voyages, in whatever direction they might be accustomed to sail. The Hebrew names for apes, kofim (singular kof), and peacocks, tukijim, undoubtedly point to an Indian derivation. For kof, ape, is in Sanskrit kafi, "the nimble," and tukij corresponds with the Malabar tôgai. The apes which the sailors of those times brought back from their distant journeys were probably Asiatic, even if the possibility is not excluded that the Israelite-Phœnician ships occasionally touched the African coasts and brought monkeys thence. That different kinds of monkeys were kept by the ancient Hebrews as pets, and were also trained for employment in household tasks, appears in numerous places in the post-Biblical literature. Four kinds of monkeys were particularly mentioned: kof, the ape in general, where it alone is named; when it appears at the same time with others it perhaps refers to the Indian Hanuman (Semnopithecus entellus); kipud or kipuph (regarded by some commentators as an abbreviation of cercopithecus), a tailed ape or baboon; Adne-hasadeh, or Abne-hasadeh, or Adam-hasadeh (according to Bochart), or Bar-nash-ditur, corresponding with the orangoutang or the anthropoid apes; and Delphik. Everywhere is a relationship of the ape with man suggested, and in the ritual casuistics the ape is regarded as a kind of man, and so considered in view of the religious law. At the sight of an ape or a monkey, the benediction was uttered, "Praised be he who changes his creatures!"—an allusion to the belief which was found among many ancient people, especially among the Arabs, that the ape was a degenerated form of man, or that the latter took on the outward appearance of the ape in consequence of moral degeneration (Talmud, B. Berachoth, 58 b.). But since the ape to which the benediction applies is placed in the same category with a negro, albino, or dwarf, the idea appears to underlie it that the variation is an inborn one. The former acceptation is supported in Berachoth 57 b., "To see an ape or a monkey in a dream is a bad sign"; and in Bereschit Rabba C., 23, "In the time of Enoch men were changed into apes." Rabbi Jose taught that the corpse of an Adne-hasadeh was unclean in the tent the same as that of a man, while the laws in the case of the bodies of beasts were quite different. Immediately afterward the same Rabbi Jose expresses the opinion that the ape (kof) must be regarded as an undomesticable or hardly domesticable animal. According to him, the Adne-hasadeh stands much nearer to man than the common ape or than any other tailed species of ape. It appears from JomaYoma [sic] 29 b and Menachot 100 b, that the ape